Never Post

Mike talks with Jon Greenaway, aka litcritguy, about the horror of online food videos; Georgia talks with Katie Notopoulos about why you can’t personalize your social profiles a la MySpace anymore; ALSO leaf crunches! 

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Intro Links
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Food Gore

Find Jon:
Segment Links:
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The End of Personalization

Find Katie:
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

What we need is a crane & to chain chains
around this blood-soaked ________. The kitchen
workers hang from the vents with duct tape.
We need the _____ put on a slide, there were
signs of struggle. There is always some precedent:

You have heard, I think, about H.,
whoever he was, & how he met his death because his
father had too much suspicion, this you will not believe,
and I can hardly prove it, but I am that same H…

Excerpt of Forensics, by Ben Doyle

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
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Creators & Guests

Host
Mike Rugnetta
Host of Never Post. Creator of Fun City, Reasonably Sound, Idea Channel and other internet things.
Producer
Hans Buetow
Independent Senior Audio Producer. Formerly with Terrible, Thanks for Asking and The New York Times

What is Never Post?

A podcast about and for the internet, hosted by Mike Rugnetta

Mike Rugnetta:

Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. And this intro was written on Tuesday, November 19th at 8:50 AM Eastern. We have a mind boggling show for you this week. In our first segment, me and theorist and writer John Greenaway, aka the Internet's lit crit guy, talk about gross food videos.

Mike Rugnetta:

And in our second segment, Georgia talks with journalist and post pioneer, Katie Netopulos, about why after Myspace, you can't really personalize your social media profiles anymore. Also, guessing the leaf crunch sound. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have 4 stories for you this week. Blue Sky has seen a massive influx of new users following the presidential election, Elon Musk's appointment as the head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, and the adjustment of X's block feature, such that blocked accounts can still see your posts.

Mike Rugnetta:

These developments and more, like an increasingly toxic discourse environment, inescapable white supremacy, non stop ads for as seen on TV quality products, I could go on, it's all resulted in what is being called the Exodus. Some of the folks jumping ship have moved to threads, which you can think of as kind of like the hotel lobby of social media platforms and many others have moved to blue sky with the latter adding some 1,000,000 users per day. Just as I am writing this, like literally this moment, the service has just crossed 20,000,000 total users, up from 9,000,000 in early September. Users tout many features of Blue Sky, its customizable non algorithmic feed, the availability of block lists and starter packs for following multiple users in a group, but amongst the most beloved features is what has come to be called the nuclear block, the near total opposite of X's implementation of the feature. A blue sky block, by comparison, removes all traces of the blocked person from your experience of the website.

Mike Rugnetta:

It is as though, while signed in, at least you do not exist to them and they do not exist to you, leading to a blissful norm of non engagement with trolls, racists, and other online hate and engagement farmers who can be banished to the shadow realm with the click of a button. The Onion has purchased Infowars, the media company run by the morally and now financially bankrupt, supplement shilling, Hulk Hogan impersonator Alex Jones. Partnered with the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, The Onion won the bankruptcy auction wherein the company was put up for sale. However, within hours, a judge halted the process, both to verify how the auction would be paid and also to verify what they would be paying for. Would, The New York Times reports, The Onion also own Alex Jones' social media accounts?

Mike Rugnetta:

These questions remain open at the time of writing, but Ben Collins, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, which owns The Onion, posted on Blue Sky, I would like to reiterate, we own everything, the broadcast equipment, the supplements, the intellectual property for Brain Force Plus. We are still trying to figure out what to do with it. Donald Trump has named Brendan Carr as his pick to chair the Federal Communications Commission, the agency which regulates, quote, communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. Carr has served on the board of the FCC since 2017 and has publicly opposed net neutrality, a principle which states ISPs must treat all Internet communications equally, not privileging a certain data streams over others in some way or another. Also supports changes to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which holds that platforms are not directly liable for the content posted by their users.

Mike Rugnetta:

And finally, Pew Research reports that per recent polling, quote, news influencers are mostly men and more explicitly identify as right leaning than left leaning, and that about 20% of Americans say they regularly get their news from a news influencer. That percentage increases to 37% in the 18 to 29 age bracket. Many Republicans, Pew writes, have long believed that social media sites censor conservative viewpoints, but overall, more news influencers explicitly present a politically right leaning orientation than a left leaning one, 27% versus 21%, in their account bios, posts, websites, or media coverage, end quote. TikTok appears to be the exception to the rule, where the gender gap is smaller, 50 to 45% still in favor of men, and twenty 5 to 28% right versus left leaning. News influencers on TikTok says Pew are more likely than those on other sites to show support for LGBTQ plus rights or identify as LGBTQ plus in their account profiles.

Mike Rugnetta:

In show news, we have made an audience survey for you, our audience. We would love to know more about you, but also mostly about how you like the show and, you know, maybe how you don't like it in certain ways. You can find a link in the show notes to a short survey that we would love love love for you to fill out. It should only take you about 10 minutes max and it will help us immeasurably in understanding what you like and don't like about the show so that we can make it better in its upcoming second year. We're about to hit a year.

Mike Rugnetta:

Wild stuff. Wild stuff. The survey is gonna be active until the end of the year. So if you're listening to this and it's still 2024, get on in there. Leave us some of your thoughts.

Mike Rugnetta:

We would love to hear them. The link is in the show notes. Okay. That's the news I have for you this week. In our first segment, you're gonna hear me and John talk about food gore.

Mike Rugnetta:

In the second segment, Georgia and Katie on the personalization of user profiles. But first, a page from the book of Tik Tok, Jason steps on leaves.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Okay.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Alright. So there's this trend going around TikTok where people are arranging a leaf, a dead leaf, a dry leaf. It is autumn here in Northeast US. And they are stepping on them to see what kind of sound they make. But first, they are guessing and using their mouth to create the sound they think the leaf will make.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Now, a bit behind on the leaf blowing around my house, so I have a lot of dry leaves and I think I'm gonna give this the try that it deserves here. So I'm lining up a few good examples here. These are all maple leaves for the most part. Looks like maybe a catalpa from across the street has blown in some sungy, other small things. But the big contributor to this sound is gonna be the maple leaf.

Jason Oberholtzer:

So let's start with a single leaf here. Get a nice big one that's got enough structural integrity to get some crunch into it. And I think the crunch is where I'm starting. Okay. I think it's a little low.

Jason Oberholtzer:

It's sort of higher up than that. I'll try another one, another big maple. That was pretty close. That was pretty close. Okay.

Jason Oberholtzer:

I'm gonna try a little catalpa. I think that was in there. I think you hear my boot more than you hear that little Now for a pile. This is where the audio engineering chops come in. This is a complicated sonic environment I'm gonna create.

Jason Oberholtzer:

For my final act here, I'm gonna move a couple dozen leaves to a big

Jason Oberholtzer:

pile.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Alright, and I'm thinking this is gonna be, You know, I think what I'm missing is the impact point on that one. Let me try that one again. Pile it up, because it's like a. The impact of the boot on the ground. Feels good.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Think we nailed it. This is why you trust audio professionals.

Mike Rugnetta:

John Greenway, thank you so much for joining us on Never Post.

Jon Greenaway:

Long time listener, first time caller. Thank you so much for taking the time to have me on the show.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. So we, for folks who maybe don't know, we have known each other on the Internet for quite a while. We actually collaborated many years ago on some Idea Channel scripts.

Jon Greenaway:

Yes, we did. You, you were very kind enough to to get in touch and, ask for my help when, working on a video about, Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Jon Greenaway:

it's it was a weird way to get to know you properly, but I'm very glad it happened.

Mike Rugnetta:

What, what sweet summer children, we were

Mike Rugnetta:

back then. So at Never Post, we've been tossing around this idea for a little while about how certain kinds of food videos are actually horror films and you are the just you came right to mind as someone who I wanted to collaborate with on this because of your expertise. So can you just, tell everybody kind of like, where you're joining us from?

Jon Greenaway:

I can. I am a, I'm a former academic and a current writer and podcaster. I am an expert in the horror media, and I've just published a book called Capitalism, A Horror Story. And I also have a podcast which I co host with some friends of mine where we talk about horror movies and politics philosophy called Horror Vanguard.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yes. This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's the perfect perspective for us to talk about food videos. I have a video on my computer that I saved probably 2, 3 years ago because of how strange it is. It's vertical, 2 minutes long, file name looks great, all lowercase, exclamation mark at the end.

Mike Rugnetta:

In this video, a woman in a low white asymmetrical tank top stands behind a quartz countertop. You can only see her from waist to shoulders and when the video starts, she pours vegetable oil all over her hands, the countertop and a kielbasa that she is gripping. She massages the sausage not not suggestively, plunges it up to her wrists bent to form a u shape into a bucket of opaque lilac liquid. There's a jump cut. The liquid is solid.

Mike Rugnetta:

She removes her hands. The kielbasa remains inside threaded through 2 hand shaped cavities. Another jump cut. A baking dish of molten cheese is on the countertop. She pours it into the wrist sized holes of the mold and all over the counter.

Mike Rugnetta:

Another jump cut. The cheese is hardened. She breaks away the silicone. The man filming interjects, oh, wow. Okay.

Mike Rugnetta:

Okay. Is that the cheese? Bits of bright orange cheese peek through. She bends over so her cleavage occupies the top third of the frame. Another jump cut to a lazy Susan and on it, the kielbasa wrapped in wet flaccid cheese flecked with rubber, in nothing even close to resembling the shape of hands.

Mike Rugnetta:

Saltine crackers are strewn about. She nudges the oozing mass and the cameraman exclaims

Video:

Great.

Video:

Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

Listener, the result is not great. It is horrific. And this video itself is but the smallest tip of the content kielbasa iceberg. The internet is lousy with weird, gross food videos. There are the, ostensibly, homemade, vertical courses, but there are also longer form, horizontal offerings fresh from viral content farms like Chef Club and Twisted Food which offer videos showing such sites as the giant cheeseburger and fries crunchwrap, the deep fried bbq chicken stuffed pizzadilla, and the garlic bread and meatball sub.

Mike Rugnetta:

Which sounds reasonable, but entails shoving a dozen meatballs into an entire loaf of bread that is then cloven with half a dozen discs of mozzarella, baked, sliced, and served on a bed of molten orange cheese. It is nightmarish.

Jon Greenaway:

These videos are so strange. A mash up of a very American mise en scene in a kind of excessive horrifying surplus. The food in these videos looks weird and hyperreal. Vast quantities of blood red ground beef, the sickly off white of viscous melted cheese appearing like pus, countertops smeared in oil or red sauce or salsa. There's a queasy excessiveness to just how much food there is.

Jon Greenaway:

It all looks like recipes, and there is absolutely a formal process of sorts being followed, but it's like a nightmare in that something that is recognizable appears before you, but it's wrong. Remember the video of the SpaghettiOs pie?

Video:

That's so good.

Jon Greenaway:

This isn't cooking per se, and this isn't strictly speaking food. This is food gore.

Video:

Yum.

Mike Rugnetta:

If you try to describe these videos to someone who isn't that online, nothing about them seems real. These videos are horror films. Under the surface of their appearance, there's something violent, designed to worm their way into your feed, to hijack your attention span, to burrow into your brain. They want you to consume them.

Jon Greenaway:

Really, the only way I can properly articulate what these videos feel like is to talk about a horror movie. Damien Leone's Terrifier Films. They follow the hyper violent adventures of Art the clown, who kills people in a host of genuinely disgusting ways. The films use some deeply impressive practical effects to deliberately create horrific spectacles of violence designed to gross you out to the point that stories about people throwing up at screenings are a key part of the film's marketing buzz. The second film features a surreal dream sequence in which art goes on a violent rampage at a cartoon style food truck and the food served up becomes filled with maggots, insects, and glass.

Jon Greenaway:

If food gore has a theme song, surely it would be this.

Video:

The grub is down right gruesome but you're up but tight so big. Because food's a little funny.

Mike Rugnetta:

Food Gore had its biggest moment 2 or 3 years ago. Around when I saved looks great In the thick of the coronavirus pandemic. Their ubiquity became a cause celebre. Refinery 29, Vox, Vice, The Verge, Lifehacker all wrote pieces, sometimes multiple pieces about this genre of video in 2021 alone. Friend of the show and garbage human, Ryan Broderick, even wrote a gross food videos piece for Eater in 2021.

Mike Rugnetta:

Detailing how much of the most viral food gore fare, the lower budget entries made in home kitchens by people, not content farms in studios, was made by 1 guy and his pals. Rick Lacks. A magician from Las Vegas. Ryan writes, Lacks told Eater that when the pandemic hit, there was suddenly no way to perform in front of live audiences. So he started bringing his friends into his Facebook network.

Mike Rugnetta:

Let's make videos together, he said. It's both friendship and business. The crew ended up hitting algorithmic gold. The absurdity of these videos got people to watch till the end and to write comments. Precisely a moment in social algorithm history and watch time and engagement were priorities.

Mike Rugnetta:

In a long deleted Twitter post about Chef Club, for instance, one person comments, it's called Chef Club because chefs beat the people who invent these recipes with a club. And another, this is my favorite OnlyFans. There's an impulse to react to what one just saw if only to create the context that these videos otherwise completely lack. It's the shave and a haircut of posting.

Jon Greenaway:

On Horror Vanguard, we have a saying, horror wants to do things to your body. Horror is never simply just something you watch. A good horror movie physically affects you, makes you sweat or the hairs on the back of your neck prickle. Some of those things that horror can do, you won't enjoy, but some of them, well, you might be surprised. Horror can make you smile.

Jon Greenaway:

It can make you scream. It can make you feel just a little bit sick. FoodGore does the same thing. These videos are precisely designed for maximal algorithmic return. They want your attention, but they also want you to act, to share, to quote it, to comment.

Jon Greenaway:

There's a powerful financial incentive for the video creators to design these videos so that they too do things to your body.

Mike Rugnetta:

There's a common line on food gore that it is essentially a kind of fetish material. Sploshing suggests Logan Mahan for Inside Hook in 2021. Quote, a fetish where people enjoy being inside of, covered in, sitting on, etcetera, jelly like or food substances, end quote. Or perhaps it's American Mukbang, as Ryan Broderick put it. But we think this is at best only sort of true.

Mike Rugnetta:

These videos certainly do rest on a certain kind of arousal. For some people, there is a sense of satisfaction, a kind of fascination when you want to see just how strange this thing will be when it's finished. We think this has something to do with the background of so many of the producers being magicians or entertainers. You watch, and even though you know it's a trick, you know that there's a kind of deception happening, there's still the pleasurable tension of waiting to see it play out.

Jon Greenaway:

Philosophers would call this jouissance. That kind of pleasure that comes from wanting to get to the end of something and at the same time, enjoying the moment of suspension in which the big reveal is delayed. So I understand why people do see these things as being a kind of fetish content, but this is perhaps a bit too simplistic. I think a better way of thinking about this is through the idea of a libidinal economy. Put simply, this is, as Michel Foucault wrote, "the flows of desire, the fears and anxieties, the loves and the despairs that traverse the social field."

Jon Greenaway:

Of course, we now exist in an age wherein the field of our desires and emotions are tied up in media and technological systems that monetize our attention and those flows of desire, fear, and anxiety. Making us feel certain things is deeply, enormously profitable. There is no distinction between the financial success and cultural virality of these videos and the deep seated feelings of disgust, fascination, or even arousal they are designed to induce. These videos do not exist in the fetish economy, or the influencer economy, or the comedy economy, or even the culinary economy. Because ultimately, there is only one economy.

Mike Rugnetta:

We're creating good videos, Rick Lax told Ryan for Eater. Before clarifying, when I say good videos, I mean videos that perform well on social media. How appropriate that a magician is at the center of all of this. Someone who hijacks and controls attention. Often with the aid of knives and a beautiful body.

Mike Rugnetta:

Though usually not with so much molten cheese. Sociologist Ashley Mears writes quote, videos such as Lax's represent the rawest form of the social media campaign for our attention. They don't need to inform or inspire. They simply have to make it hard for us to look away end quote. Like a sunset or maybe a car wreck.

Mike Rugnetta:

Very expensive car wreck. In a piece she wrote for the economist in 2022, Mears details just how rich Rick and his friends became. Posting their videos, not just food related, but all kinds of videos through Facebook's partner program. Mears spent several weeks with his group of video makers in Las Vegas and she writes of mansions, designer handbags, huge parties, closets full of costumes, entire rooms crowded with props. Mears reports that some members of the crew were making nearly $30,000 a week.

Mike Rugnetta:

A successful upload, she writes, could earn enough to buy a Tesla. Facebook prioritized Lacks' videos and videos like them because they keep audiences in a strange liminal state between satisfaction and hunger. That state keeps you on platform, watching videos of countertop nachos and ads. These videos, food gore videos are particularly good at this because of what they do to your body. They depict things that sit between so many counter posed qualities.

Mike Rugnetta:

Interest and disgust, allure and repulsion, food nourishment and gore slop.

Jon Greenaway:

The literary critic and philosopher, Sianne Ngai, in her 2005 book, Ugly Feelings, offers a taxonomy of some of the common emotional states of modern life. Among them, disgust. She points out 2 things. Disgust is a means of policing and reinforcing a boundary between the subject and object, between me and that which is currently grossing me out on my TikTok FYP. There is urgency to it.

Jon Greenaway:

It is immediate and visceral. We have to reject it. Interestingly, Nagai also points out that there is a sense in which, quoting, it seeks to include or draw others into its exclusion of its objects, enabling a strange kind of sociability. In other words, it isn't enough for just me to find something disgusting, I have to share my disgust with you, asking you that ephemeral audience of the social web, what did I just watch? And if you don't share it, that puts us on opposite sides of an almost unbridgeable divide.

Jon Greenaway:

This notion of a divide is where the psychoanalytic term the abject comes in. It's generally credited to the work of Bulgarian French literary critic, philosopher and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror is her book length explanation of the concept. Objection is kind of like discussed, but where Nagai thinks of it as an aesthetic response to a particular external object, Kristeva thinks that it is much more bound up within our own sense of self. Take the nauseating example of the skin that can form on top of milk which she connects to the struggles of young children to differentiate themselves from their parental figures.

Jon Greenaway:

"Nausea makes me bulk at that milk, separates me from the mother and father who profit it. I want none of that element sign of their desire. I do not want to listen. I do not assimilate it. I expel it. But since

Jon Greenaway:

the food is not an other for me, I expel myself. I spit myself out. I abject myself within the same motion through which I claim to establish myself." In short, food gore fits the category of the object. Something we want to cast away from us because it makes visible in a visceral way the internal realities of our body.

Jon Greenaway:

We try and recoil from it, but we may as well try to vomit up ourselves. At the end of the day, despite what we tell ourselves about who or even what we are, food gore proves that underneath it all, we're all just so much meat and fluid smeared across an American kitchen island.

Mike Rugnetta:

Chances are you haven't seen as much food gore in the last couple years. The algorithm, as capricious as they always are, moved on. Facebook deprioritized the kinds of videos Lacks was making, what Mears calls watch bait and which you or I might call engagement or rage bait. Content designed to hook you, to reel you in, to get you to write, what did I just watch? Before stranding you suddenly to watch more.

Mike Rugnetta:

This type of content is extremely good for platforms. Researchers have found that baiting posts, rage and otherwise, increase engagement on not just the enraging post, but the posts around it as well. There's a kind of halo effect, a bloom of intensity that transfers from post to post, but at a cost. People are tired. They're increasingly suspicious.

Mike Rugnetta:

Of platforms, of content creators, of algorithms, of products designed to keep them in one place. To waste their time. A thing which it seems every platform is trying to do. We had a name for this, back at the start of the social internet. A name for things that purposefully wasted your time, and we called them trolls.

Mike Rugnetta:

After a much older set of horror stories. Of course, that wasn't their whole deal. Trolls were self styled troublemakers who maintained that spewing racist sexist chum would somehow convince people they shouldn't take the internet very seriously. Really, they just wanted to be racist and sexist without consequence. They also used to say that it was their job to waste idiots time.

Mike Rugnetta:

So it became, in places at least, imperative to learn to notice when your time was being wasted by a disingenuous interlocutor. So that you could escape and go live your life. Being caught in such a trap was considered shameful. Now, but in a much different sense, sure, and at a much larger scale, it's something we opt into. Willingly.

Mike Rugnetta:

Constantly. We give our whole bodies over to platforms that want nothing more than to enrage us, on purpose to waste our time. Platforms may say they seek to reduce the prevalence of batty material, but probably only once they have other plans to get their hooks into you. It's not just horror that does something to your body. The whole machine of the Internet does too, which I guess could mean

Jon Greenaway:

So food gore exists at the intersection of the attention economy, our own provoked and manipulated sense of disgust, a hyper capitalist spectacle of huge portions of food in an era of high inflation and a nightmarish wrong quality. They are significantly less popular now as the algorithm is a fickle beast.

Mike Rugnetta:

But what's becoming increasingly common on social media instead are AI generated pictures and videos of food. Even to the point that entire restaurants appear on Instagram and everything shown is simply not real.

Jon Greenaway:

Now, this might be seen as an improvement in some respects. We don't need to see the gross stuff people are doing to attract our attention anymore. But if anything, this AI food is equally, if not more, horrifying. The Internet is awash with it now. AI slop, which is, of course, something else you are expected to consume.

Jon Greenaway:

I think this is a great term for it that really gets the ways in which beneath the surface, there is something really viscerally gross about the way AI has started to take over internet culture.

Mike Rugnetta:

The huge environmental costs of generative AI, the degree to which models are trained on the exploited labor of underpaid workers in colossal data centers. What the academic Phil Jones calls micro work. And the extent to which artists, writers and creators have their work stolen and scraped into training sets. We might think of AI as somehow less gross, but this really isn't the case. As the philosopher Adam c Jones puts it in his book, The New Flesh Life and Death in the Data Economy.

Mike Rugnetta:

Today, all that is solid melts into data. Slop depends on a gross exploitation of labor and creativity to drown us in artificial pictures of food simply too good to be true.

Jon Greenaway:

AI Slop optimized food gore out of existence. There's something haunting about the growth of AI food. Say what you will about the people who monetize and perfected the form. There is something low key fascinating about them successfully gaming the algorithm, and now they're gone. We still have the form, but we no longer have any need for the thing that made it appetizing.

Jon Greenaway:

The real people who were smashing their palms into mountains of ground beef.

Mike Rugnetta:

So what do we do? How do we tread slop? We start by recognizing that we exist physically online. The digital is the physical. Content is not just on screens, but it's in our heads.

Mike Rugnetta:

In our bodies too. We have to cultivate and pay attention to the ways content delivered by impersonal algorithms does things to our bodies.

Jon Greenaway:

Food gore and videos like it are trying to reach through the screen just as much as a horror film would. Trying in all their gruesome excess to make us disgusted and nauseous, to get us to stay on the site, to keep scrolling, and to pass on the horror and disgust as widely

Mike Rugnetta:

as we can. As Mears points out, food gore pioneer Rick Lacks puts it like this in his own book. About magicians, I've always tried to learn their tricks and understand the psychology behind the way they work, not because I wanna pull the tricks myself, but because I'm afraid of falling victim to them.

Jon Greenaway:

It is excellent advice to follow.

Mike Rugnetta:

John, thank you so much for coming on Neverpost, for co writing this with me. This was a blast. It's been it's been a real a real pleasure.

Jon Greenaway:

Thank you so much for having me on. I was sick and disgusted by so much of what I had to endure in doing this.

Mike Rugnetta:

I knew that you were up for the challenge. You of all people, where can people find you and your work on the Internet?

Jon Greenaway:

People can find me on Horror Vanguard wherever you get your podcasts from, and you can find things that I write, on my own blog and website, The Haunts.

Mike Rugnetta:

Hell yeah. We'll put all those links in the show notes. Leaf will be shook.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Okay.

Georgia Hampton:

I wanna start off with a very simple question, which is, what did your Myspace look like?

Katie Notopoulos:

My Myspace was not particularly customized, I don't think.

Georgia Hampton:

That's Katie Netopulos, who's a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering tech and internet culture. I wanted to talk to her about profile customization on social media and how it's changed. So, of course, I had to start with Myspace. I got a Myspace when I was 12 years old. I had to get permission to get a Myspace.

Georgia Hampton:

And once I made an account, I spent hours personalizing my profile. I needed the cursor to have a glitter tail. I changed the background to a picture I liked and turned it black and white and tiled it. I definitely added a song, and it was definitely a song by My Chemical Romance. Do you remember the song you chose?

Katie Notopoulos:

I would not choose songs. No. That was for teenagers. I was too old to do that. Keep in mind, I was 22, 23.

Katie Notopoulos:

So I was like a young person living in New York City. I, like, wanted to seem cool. I wanted to seem, like, funny, sort of have, like, jokes in there, like, a lot of jokes. Irony. Like, it would be really funny to put, like, a bunch of dorky music as your favorite music instead of putting your real favorite music because that would be somehow embarrassing.

Georgia Hampton:

I mean, you're completely right. It's it's one of those things where the

Georgia Hampton:

I mean, you're completely right. It's it's one of those things where the second you said it, I'm like, yeah. Of course. I'm like, of course,

Georgia Hampton:

your experience would be different because I was very overwhelmingly sincere. Yeah.

Katie Notopoulos:

But that's but that's the beauty of it. Right? Like, I mean, think of it.

Katie Notopoulos:

Like, I feel like some version of it of, like, how you choose to represent yourself to other people by these choices that you can make, they're gonna be very different for people in their twenties and then a teenager. Because you're just you're different you're a different person. If I had had my space when I was a teenager, I'm sure it would have been very different.

Georgia Hampton:

Personalization was a dominant aesthetic feature in the early days of the Internet. You could personalize your Myspace, your Friendster. Eventually, you could personalize your Tumblr. And to personalize meant to mess with the bones of the thing, to change the design of your profile to make it look how you wanted it to. In the decades since Myspace's heyday, social media expanded.

Georgia Hampton:

It became less clunky, it got easier to use, it became ubiquitous. Not everyone had a Myspace, but everyone and their uncle got a Facebook. And as social media platforms got nicer and more popular, it's not hard to imagine a world where personalization remained a key feature of that experience. And who knows? Maybe there'd be new ways to change the design, more complicated methods of making your social media experience aesthetically yours.

Georgia Hampton:

But that isn't what happened. First, Facebook debuted and swiftly eclipsed Myspace in popularity. Unlike its predecessors, on Facebook, your profile wasn't personalizable. You could add information about yourself and photos and all that, but the design was off limits. The background stayed white, the banner color was always the same shade of blue.

Georgia Hampton:

And then in 2006, Facebook introduced the news feed.

Katie Notopoulos:

That was really exciting because you could have this amazing experience getting all the information in this news feed that previously you had to keep going to other people's profiles all the time constantly to get. And I think that I mean, that is the very weird thing about the way that MySpace worked is that the way you would spend time on Myspace was surfing around other people's profiles. Right? Like, whereas, how we consume most social media now is scrolling through a feed. Frankly, like, you don't look at people's profiles all that often on social media anymore because the main action is centralized feed.

Georgia Hampton:

The introduction of the feed essentially changed the way we used social media. The digital spot to see and be seen wasn't someone's profile anymore. It was the feed. What mattered wasn't how your profile looked, it was the content you shared on the feed. Plus, as Facebook became this globally recognized name, it made sense that it should have a globally recognized style too.

Georgia Hampton:

As Forbes reported in 2022, it's crucial for any brand to have its own visual personality to build a stronger relationship with users. It makes the company feel reliable, which builds trust. So as a global brand, Facebook's design needed to be clean and legible. It was just good business to be able to look at someone's screen and know instantly that you were looking at a Facebook profile. Also, being able to do that much design personalization became a security issue as so many people started joining the site.

Georgia Hampton:

Allowing everyone to have access to the code of a website, even just for aesthetic reasons, it opens a lot of doors for bad actors. So from the company's perspective, it was just better to shut off that option for everyone for the sake of safety. Needless to say, personalization was out. There would be no sparkly cursors on Facebook, but in its place came something else, customization. Customization offered only the most surface user forward stuff that would be relevant to you on a social media site.

Georgia Hampton:

You could choose who you follow, you could like things. It also allowed for some self led moderation: who you block, what words you muted, And there remain some vague nods toward visual personalization. I can still change the banner photo on my Twitter. On Instagram, I can set the theme of my DM chat with my friend to a Call of Duty theme, which Instagram already designed for me. It's toothless personalization.

Georgia Hampton:

It's the ability to choose from a pre approved number of things. You have no real control anymore. You're a user. You use the platform and interact with it in the way that has been designated for you. My first reaction to this is to get mad, to say, oh, come on.

Georgia Hampton:

What the hell is this? I wanna use HTML again, but maybe my indignation isn't exactly the objective.

Katie Notopoulos:

I worry that you are too I can't tell not nostalgic, but I'm not sure that customizing a profile page is necessarily better. It prevents a lot of people with who don't know how to do it. You're so showcasing some technical skills. Right? Like, you're sort of saying, look.

Katie Notopoulos:

I know how to make a website look good. Not that many people can do that. It's not big. So it's not a tiny amount of people, but it's certainly not not everyone. Right?

Katie Notopoulos:

And so having sort of standardized profiles that can't be customized is a little more egalitarian. Right? Like, everyone your profile can look the same as the celebrities, you know?

Georgia Hampton:

Yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

They And it does.

Katie Notopoulos:

Yeah. And it does. I'll concede to that because there is something equalizing about the fact that my Instagram profile's design looks the same as, like, Ariana Grande's. And it's important to point out here that the shift from the Myspace format to Facebook and Instagram also meant a shift in where we're posting from, specifically, what technology we use.

Katie Notopoulos:

And obviously, like smartphones came out in, like, 2007, but this sort of total adoption, especially among young people, took a little bit, a couple years later. And I do think that that shift probably created a lot of this change. Right? Like, you know, that that maybe it literally, like, was impossible to do the customization because you're on a phone app as opposed to HTML now. But also, like, when you're on a tiny screen, it's a lot more satisfying to scroll through pictures than to look at different, profiles.

Georgia Hampton:

Contemporary social media platforms have enacted a controlled change in where and how we are allowed to express ourselves. Facebook won't allow you to make your profile have a sparkly background, but they also don't want you to feel like the space isn't yours. So the compromise is this, you give up your HTML rights for variety on your feed, what you post. The content is what makes the experience feel tailored to you, at least at first. In the beginning days of Facebook, the newsfeed was just a chronological a chronological log of things that your friends were doing or saying, but when the feed became algorithmic, it started predicting what you'd want to see, making decisions on your behalf. Now, half the stuff in your Facebook

Georgia Hampton:

or Instagram or Twitter feeds isn't

Georgia Hampton:

even put there by in your Facebook or Instagram or Twitter feeds isn't even put there by you or your friends. Again, the platform decides for you, and that points to another issue here.

Katie Notopoulos:

I think it's a very, like, different shift of power and how people perceive the way they're using these things. When we think about algorithms and how they control our feeds, I feel like people feel so helpless and annoyed by these algorithms. And in a way, that's completely opposite from, like, hey, I can customize my own feed or, my own page to look how I want. I have control over it. Like, it's mine.

Katie Notopoulos:

People think of their, you know, the algorithms that are choosing what to show them and they're thinking this it's this other entity that exists and I barely have any control over it and often it's not doing what I want at all.

Georgia Hampton:

Our personalized algorithm should, in theory, be an exciting replacement for personalized profiles. What's more unique than an entire feed that was made specifically for you? But that's not what's happening. As we're made to become users, we are made to become consumers. Your personalized feed is made for you, the consumer, and as a consumer, you don't need a fun personalized profile anymore.

Georgia Hampton:

You just need a feed that goes on forever that you can either scroll through endlessly or post something to add to it. The destination is the feed, always. I do want to offer something because I think you're right. I think this transition to smartphones, to the feed kinda transitioned us away from looking at profiles, valuing the way that profiles looked uniquely. But more recently, there's been a lot of conversations about fatigue toward just scrolling through the feed and how exhausting it is and how sort of miserable it can be.

Georgia Hampton:

And I wonder if there's a way that the fatigue of that could open space for something else, for personalization.

Katie Notopoulos:

I love this because I do think that is happening right now. I think you are you nailed it that, like, the pendulum is sort of swinging the other way where people started to feel really bad from all the feeds. You feel very powerless in front of it. They're some of the biggest companies in the world right now. So, like, that's different.

Katie Notopoulos:

But I think that there is this relatively small but growing amount of people who are really interested in slow Internet, small Internet, people feeling like they wanna start building their own websites again, and this sort of realignment of, like, what if the goal here is not to just get as many followers and as many eyeballs? What if the goal is to, like, have a smaller audience that's more engaged and, you know, you care about and is interested in you? Sure, you lose out on some scale, but, like, is the scale even worth it?

Georgia Hampton:

I would love to sacrifice scale for the sake of feeling like I actually get to make decisions, that I'm actually having an online experience that feels like it's, you'll have to forgive me, my space again.

Katie Notopoulos:

There's different ways that one can express oneself on a social media platform. Right? Like, someone can post pictures and be like, I love posting pictures of myself and how I look, and this is, like, my self expression. And that works really well if, like, that suits you. But, like, customizing a profile is exactly the sweet spot of where they feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Katie Notopoulos:

Right? Like, you know, tweaking a little bit about how it looks. You're not totally exposed into saying, like, here are all my deepest thoughts when you choose your browser icon or whatever. There is something exciting about that level of social, like, interaction, the sort of like really subtle detection kind of stuff. It's subtle.

Georgia Hampton:

It's fun. You get to know stuff about people.

Georgia Hampton:

It's a different kind of posting, changing the space to fit your style preferences or your mood or the new band you like. It's a kind of post that the current popular infrastructure of the social Internet doesn't really see or value, but at least in some corners of the Internet, that's starting to change.

Katie Notopoulos:

Can I hear a little bit about what your MySpace profile looked like?

Georgia Hampton:

Fine. Twist my arm.

Georgia Hampton:

The problem is because I was so young, I remember parts of it. Mhmm. I was not especially great at HTML, so what I would do was, like, scour websites that provided templates or backgrounds, and I would kind of learn how the HTML...

Georgia Hampton:

I want to thank Katie Netopoulos for chatting with me. You can find more of her work at businessinsider.com, threads, Blue Sky, and occasionally Twitter. And I'd love to hear from you about your relationship to personalization and what you miss or maybe don't miss about it. Have you found some way of returning to this age of personalization that we didn't talk about? The info about how to reach us is in the show notes.

Hans Buetow:

This one's gonna be scrack. Spunk. Spunk.

Hans Buetow:

Oh, yeah. Crick. Sip.

Hans Buetow:

Tick. Hook. Quick. Twock. Tick.

Mike Rugnetta:

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, December 4th. Never Post is an independent staff owned podcast with no funding, no runway, no production partners. It's just us, the folks you hear on the show working on it in the time we have between other work that we do. We are entirely listener funded and that being the case, we need your support to keep making the show.

Mike Rugnetta:

So, if you like it, if you think we're fun, funny, interesting, entertaining, useful, good companions, if you like George's voice, please consider telling your pals about the show and then also becoming a member at neverpo.st. It is only with your help that we are able to keep doing what we're currently doing and if we get very, very lucky, to do even more of it in the future. Neverpo.st to become a member. Neverpost producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and the mysterious doctor First Name Last Name. Our senior producer is Hans Beutto.

Mike Rugnetta:

Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer and I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. What we need is a crane and to chain chains around this blood soaked. The kitchen workers hang from the vents with duct tape. We need the put on a slide. There were signs of struggle.

Mike Rugnetta:

There's always some precedent. You have heard, I think, about H, whoever he was, and how he met his death because his father had too much suspicion. This, you will not believe and I can hardly prove it, but I am that same h. Excerpt of forensics by Ben Doyle. Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.